Originally Posted by
chicago_bastard
You are comparing apples and oranges when you want to subtract production costs of the UK box office but don't do the same for the US box office.
That's an exaggeration as I certainly didn't state any of that.
But can you enlighten me why Universal keeps producing films for a franchise (Fast & Furious) that constantly fails at the US box office but is a major success overseas? According to you they don't make any profit with these movies so are they throwing money deliberately out of the window just for fun or what is going on?
Actually I have when I cited the numbers provided by Deadline. It's pretty simple math and I can't believe I have to repeat it but here we go:
Deadline, one of the three major magazines covering the movie industry and therefore cited by pretty much everyone, is giving a number of 1,181,000,000 for Endgame's global theater income out of its 2,798,000,000 box office. So the share for cinemas is already subtracted from this number.
60% of Endgame's US box office amounts to 515,023,800.
Now we subtract that sum from the 1,181,000,000 number and get 665,976,200 as international income for Endgame.
The international income of 665,976,200 is therefore bigger than the US income of 515,023,800.
I was talking about the share so bringing up the comparably low box office in India doesn't really fit the argument as it only shows that the MCU and Hollywood movies in general don't succeed there like in other parts of the world but that isn't due to the share. I'm aware of the special relation the French government has to foreign products of culture but I'm still certain the share Disney gets there is notably higher than 25% because the country is very different from China.
If Disney doesn't agree with the 25% share in China, Chinese theaters just won't show any Disney movies, end of story. So Disney has only the choice to make the concession of a 25% share or gain nothing at all from the Chinese market. France though is a different story. First it isn't as big and important as China and second it's a democracy with a free market-economy and a free society. Because it isn't a big market like China in negotiations about the share Disney could threaten to just pull out their movies from a release in that country if French theaters don't want to compromise. And with France being a democracy with a free society they would have to compromise to some extent because the French population wouldn't be okay with not being able to see the biggest Hollywood movies and a government being responsible for that would likely face worse election results. China doesn't have that problem because they have no elections and moreover no freedom of speach, so anybody speaking up against the regime banning Hollywood movies would likely end in jail. That's why France and China aren't comparable.
There may be some other totalitarian countries but among the important markets for MCU movies which are basically Europe, Latin America and Asian countries like South Korea and Japan the majority are democracies with free market-economy with only China being a notable exception. And in free market-economies supply and demand tend to regulate these matters and the demand for MCU movies has been high, therefore Disney was in a good position to make favorable deals with the theaters in these countries.
To get back to the the primary issue I just don't see the political climate in the USA having such a big impact on the success of comic book movies. We have to consider that comic book movies didn't become big with the MCU, there was already the successful Spider-Man trilogy between 2002 and 2007. So comic book movies were successful in a timespan of roughly 20 years under three very different presidencies and some major social climate changes like post 9/11 / war on terror / war in Iraq / financial crisis in 2008. Sometime the interest in comic book movies will fade like it did for other successful genres like western movies but I don't think the political climate will play a major role in that, more that audiences get bored with seeing the same old stories again and demand something new.